Good points man! You really covered the topic well. And chat and conversation is a nice building block to not only get stuff accessible in places that are low bandwidth and low-tech but also prepare for future developments in voice interaction as what you learn and cover in text you can easily move to voice once voice is good enough.
I also like the approach of Viv here to build complex queries dynamically over different hooks. These kinds of technologies will be key to enabling more complex use cases with bots.
ManagedVMs don't use k8s under the covers afaik. However there's GKE (Google Container Engine), which goes on top of (at least 3) MVMs and that one does use k8s.
While it is true that going with a PaaS(-like) solution like AppEngine or Heroku is easy in the beginning it can get pretty expensive pretty fast and it limits you in the choice of languages, frameworks, and data stores you can use. This can in some instances bring technical debt with it that will pose a hurdle when growing.
Actually, using Docker combined with an orchestration layer like k8s is supposed to give the the ease-of-use of PaaS with the flexibility of IaaS (or MVMs), however, managing sth like k8s by yourself is not that easy and you will need quite a bunch of other tools on top, i.e. for monitoring and stuff, which paves the way for Container-as-a-Service solutions, like RancherOS, tutum, or Giant Swarm (disclaimer, I'm part of the latter company)
We are looking for a passionate Developer (remote workpossible) who wants to be the voice of our customers, who are using Giant Swarmfor architecting and deploying didtributed systems.
If it's only about solidity DigitalOcean, AWS, and similar are ok for running single-host instances of your dockerized apps. If you want to get into clusters and scaling or are looking for a way to just take care of your containers and not of the infrastructure anymore, there's not many ready-made solutions, though. Amazon is working on ECS, and Google on GKE, but both are in a very early invite only Alpha stage. Other than those two, there's currently only us at Giant Swarm (http://giantswarm.io/) afaik. If you're interested you can register for an invite and if you contact me directly, I could get you the actual invitation a bit faster.
Also note that there's quite a lot of self-service solutions based on Mesos or Kubernetes, but then you're back at managing your infrastructure yourself again and you still have to book DigitalOcean or Amazon Servers.
nice writeup, I especially like that you talk in detail about the things you learned from your "failure". Failure by itself isn't always good, but this shows how one can learn and get oneself up again after falling (technology wise).
Haven't tried it yet, it seems to be just normal notebook, but with a special space on each page to specify notebook name and tags.
Evernote accelerator would be quite possible, maybe just build a rough app MVP for scanning close to what the moleskine one does?
I like to use my iPad more these days, too, especially cause I'm an evernote fan. Still notes don't look as good as on paper and touch-pens are still not on par for easy writing on screens. A good integration with Evernote good get it out of niche-dom I think. For the big masses paper is still the goto tool at least for another 2 years ;)
I think the bigger "test" behind this is that maybe some content that you would maybe distribute as an ebook, but that needs hands-on practice for you to really get it, could be effective as this kind of paper handbook/notebook combo